2
The Planting
of English America
‫ﱛﱞﱛ‬
1500–1733
. . . For I shall yet to see it [Virginia] an Inglishe nation.
SIR WALTER RALEIGH, 1602
A s the seventeenth century dawned, scarcely a
hundred years after Columbus’s momentous land-
fall, the face of much of the New World had already been
profoundly transformed. European crops and livestock
had begun to alter the very landscape, touching off an
ecological revolution that would reverberate for centuries
to come. From Tierra del Fuego in the south to Hudson
Bay in the north, disease and armed conquest had
cruelly winnowed and disrupted the native peoples.
Several hundred thousand enslaved Africans toiled on
Caribbean and Brazilian sugar plantations. From Florida
and New Mexico southward, most of the New World lay
firmly within the grip of imperial Spain.
But North America in 1600 remained largely unex-
plored and effectively unclaimed by Europeans. Then,
as if to herald the coming century of colonization and
conflict in the northern continent, three European pow-
ers planted three primitive outposts in three distant
corners of the continent within three years of one another:
the Spanish at Santa Fe in 1610, the French at Quebec in
1608, and, most consequentially for the future United
States, the English at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607.
25
England’s Imperial Stirrings
Feeble indeed were England’s efforts in the 1500s to
compete with the sprawling Spanish Empire. As Spain’s
ally in the first half of the century, England took little
interest in establishing its own overseas colonies.
Religious conflict, moreover, disrupted England in mid-
century, after King Henry VIII broke with the Roman
Catholic Church in the 1530s, launching the English
Protestant Reformation. Catholics battled Protestants
for decades, and the religious balance of power see-
sawed. But after the Protestant Elizabeth ascended to the
English throne in 1558, Protestantism became dominant
in England, and rivalry with Catholic Spain intensified.
Ireland, which nominally had been under English
rule since the twelfth century, became an early scene of
that rivalry. The Catholic Irish sought help from
Catholic Spain to throw off the yoke of the new Protes-
tant English queen. But Spanish aid never amounted
to much; in the 1570s and 1580s, Elizabeth’s troops
26 CHAPTER 2 The Planting of English America, 1500–1733
Sir Walter Ralegh (Raleigh) (c. 1552–1618), 1588
A dashing courtier who was one of Queen
Elizabeth’s favorites for his wit, good looks, and
courtly manners, he launched important colonizing
failures in the New World. For this portrait, Raleigh
presented himself as the queen’s devoted servant,
wearing her colors of black and white and her
emblem of a pearl in his left ear. After seducing
(and secretly marrying) one of Queen Elizabeth’s
maids of honor, he fell out of favor but continued
his colonial ventures in the hopes of challenging
Catholic Spain’s dominance in the Americas. He
was ultimately beheaded for treason.
crushed the Irish uprising with terrible ferocity, inflict-
ing unspeakable atrocities upon the native Irish people.
The English crown confiscated Catholic Irish lands and
“planted” them with new Protestant landlords from
Scotland and England. This policy also planted the
seeds of the centuries-old religious conflicts that persist
in Ireland to the present day. Many English soldiers
developed in Ireland a sneering contempt for the “sav-
age” natives, an attitude that they brought with them to
the New World.
Elizabeth Energizes England
Encouraged by the ambitious Queen Elizabeth, hardy
English buccaneers now swarmed out upon the ship-
ping lanes. They sought to promote the twin goals of
Protestantism and plunder by seizing Spanish treasure
ships and raiding Spanish settlements, even though
England and Spain were technically at peace. The most
famous of these semipiratical “sea dogs” was the courtly
Francis Drake. He plundered his way around the planet,
returning in 1580 with his ship heavily ballasted with
Spanish booty. The venture netted profits of about 4,600
percent to his financial backers, among whom, in secret,
was Queen Elizabeth. Defying Spanish protest, she
brazenly knighted Drake on the deck of his barnacled
ship.
The bleak coast of Newfoundland was the scene of
the first English attempt at colonization. This effort col-
lapsed when its promoter, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, lost his
life at sea in 1583. Gilbert’s ill-starred dream inspired his
gallant half-brother Sir Walter Raleigh to try again in
warmer climes. Raleigh organized an expedition that first
landed in 1585 on North Carolina’s Roanoke Island, off the
coast of Virginia—a vaguely defined region named in
honor of Elizabeth, the “Virgin Queen.” After several
false starts, the hapless Roanoke colony mysteriously
vanished, swallowed up by the wilderness.
These pathetic English failures at colonization con-
trasted embarrassingly with the glories of the Spanish
Empire, whose profits were fabulously enriching Spain.
Philip II of Spain, self-anointed foe of the Protestant
Reformation, used part of his imperial gains to amass an
“Invincible Armada” of ships for an invasion of England.
The showdown came in 1588, when the lumbering
Spanish flotilla, 130 strong, hove into the English Channel.
The English sea dogs fought back. Using craft that were
swifter, more maneuverable, and more ably manned,
they inflicted heavy damage on the cumbersome, over-
laden Spanish ships. Then a devastating storm arose
(the “Protestant wind”), scattering the crippled Spanish
fleet.
The rout of the Spanish Armada marked the begin-
ning of the end of Spanish imperial dreams, though

Elizabeth I (1533–1603), by Marcus Gheeraets the
Younger, c. 1592 Although accused of being vain,
fickle, prejudiced, and miserly, she proved to be
an unusually successful ruler. She never married
(hence, the “Virgin Queen”), although various
royal matches were projected.
Spain’s New World empire would not fully collapse for
three more centuries. Within a few decades, the Spanish
Netherlands (Holland) would secure their independence,
and much of the Spanish Caribbean would slip from
Spain’s grasp. Bloated by Peruvian and Mexican silver and
cockily convinced of its own invincibility, Spain had over-
reached itself, sowing the seeds of its own decline.
England’s victory over the Spanish Armada also
marked a red-letter day in American history. It damp-
ened Spain’s fighting spirit and helped ensure England’s
naval dominance in the North Atlantic. It started
England Prepares for Colonization 27
England on its way to becoming master of the world
oceans—a fact of enormous importance to the Ameri-
can people. Indeed England now had many of the
characteristics that Spain displayed on the eve of its
colonizing adventure a century earlier: a strong, unified
national state under a popular monarch; a measure of
religious unity after a protracted struggle between
Protestants and Catholics; and a vibrant sense of
nationalism and national destiny.
A wondrous flowering of the English national spirit
bloomed in the wake of the Spanish Armada’s defeat. A
golden age of literature dawned in this exhilarating
atmosphere, with William Shakespeare, at its forefront,
making occasional poetical references to England’s
American colonies. The English were seized with rest-
lessness, with thirst for adventure, and with curiosity
about the unknown. Everywhere there blossomed a new
spirit of self-confidence, of vibrant patriotism, and of
boundless faith in the future of the English nation.
When England and Spain finally signed a treaty of peace
in 1604, the English people were poised to plunge head-
long into the planting of their own colonial empire in
the New World.
See
DBQ 1 England on the
Eve of Empire
England’s scepter’d isle, as Shakespeare called it, throbbed
with social and economic change as the seventeenth
century opened. Its population was mushrooming, from
some 3 million people in 1550 to about 4 million in 1600.
In the ever-green English countryside, landlords were
“enclosing” croplands for sheep grazing, forcing many
small farmers into precarious tenancy or off the land
altogether. It was no accident that the woolen districts of
eastern and western England—where Puritanism had
taken strong root—supplied many of the earliest immi-
grants to America. When economic depression hit the
woolen trade in the late 1500s, thousands of footloose
farmers took to the roads. They drifted about England,
chronically unemployed, often ending up as beggars and
paupers in cities like Bristol and London.
This remarkably mobile population alarmed many
contemporaries. They concluded that England was
burdened with a “surplus population,” though present-
day London holds twice as many people as did all of
England in 1600.
28 CHAPTER 2 The Planting of English America, 1500–1733

pany, known as the Virginia Company of London,

In the years immediately following the
defeat of the Spanish Armada, the English
writer Richard Hakluyt (1552?–1616)
extravagantly exhorted his countrymen to
cast off their “sluggish security” and under-
take the colonization of the New World:
“There is under our noses the great and
ample country of Virginia; the inland
whereof is found of late to be so sweet
and wholesome a climate, so rich and
abundant in silver mines, a better and
richer country than Mexico itself. If it
shall please the Almighty to stir up Her
Majesty’s heart to continue with trans-
porting one or two thousand of her peo-
ple, she shall by God’s assistance, in
short space, increase her dominions,
enrich her coffers, and reduce many
pagans to the faith of Christ.”
received a charter from King James I of England for a
settlement in the New World. The main attraction was
the promise of gold, combined with a strong desire to
find a passage through America to the Indies. Like most
joint-stock companies of the day, the Virginia Company
was intended to endure for only a few years, after which
its stockholders hoped to liquidate it for a profit. This
arrangement put severe pressure on the luckless
colonists, who were threatened with abandonment in
the wilderness if they did not quickly strike it rich on the
company’s behalf. Few of the investors thought in terms
of long-term colonization. Apparently no one even
faintly suspected that the seeds of a mighty nation were
being planted.
The charter of the Virginia Company is a significant
document in American history. It guaranteed to the
overseas settlers the same rights of Englishmen that they
would have enjoyed if they had stayed at home. This
precious boon was gradually extended to subsequent
English colonies, helping to reinforce the colonists’

Sources of the Puritan “Great Migration” to New

England, 1620–1650 The dark green areas indicate
the main sources of the migration.
At the same time, laws of primogeniture decreed
that only eldest sons were eligible to inherit landed
estates. Landholders’ ambitious younger sons, among
them Gilbert, Raleigh, and Drake, were forced to seek SCOTLAND North
their fortunes elsewhere. Bad luck plagued their early, Sea
lone-wolf enterprises. But by the early 1600s, the joint-
stock company, forerunner of the modern corporation,
was perfected. It enabled a considerable number of
investors, called “adventurers,” to pool their capital.
Peace with a chastened Spain provided the opportu- ENGLAND
Irish
nity for English colonization. Population growth provided Sea
IRELAND
the workers. Unemployment, as well as a thirst for adven-
Ea

ture, for markets, and for religious freedom, provided the

st

A NORFOLK
motives. Joint-stock companies provided the financial ng
lia
means. The stage was now set for a historic effort to SUFFOLK
HERT-
establish an English beachhead in the still uncharted WALES FORD-
SHIRE ESSEX Woolen
North American wilderness. London 
Districts
 WILT-
Bristol SHIRE KENT
SOMERSET

DEVON DORSET
See el
Woolen a nn
Districts h Ch
DBQ 2 England Plants the Englis
Jamestown Seedling
In 1606, two years after peace with Spain, the hand of FRANCE
destiny beckoned toward Virginia. A joint-stock com-

George Percy (1580–1631) accompanied
Captain John Smith on his expedition to
Virginia in 1606–1607. He served as deputy
governor of the colony in 1609–1610 and
returned to England in 1612, where he
wrote A Discourse of the Plantation of
Virginia about his experiences:
“Our men were destroyed with cruel
diseases as swellings, burning fevers,
and by wars, and some departed sud-
denly, but for the most part they died of
mere famine. There were never
Englishmen left in a foreign country in
such misery as we were in this new
discovered Virginia.”
sense that even on the far shores of the Atlantic, they
remained comfortably within the embrace of traditional
English institutions. But ironically, a century and a half
later, their insistence on the “rights of Englishmen” fed
the hot resentment of the colonists against an increas-
ingly meddlesome mother country and nourished their
appetite for independence.
Setting sail in late 1606, the Virginia Company’s
three ships landed near the mouth of Chesapeake Bay,
where Indians attacked them. Pushing on up the bay,
the tiny band of colonists eventually chose a location on
the wooded and malarial banks of the James River,
named in honor of King James I. The site was easy to
defend, but it was mosquito-infested and devastatingly
unhealthful. There, on May 24, 1607, about a hundred
The Tudor Rulers of England*
Name, Reign Relation to America
Henry VII, 1485–1509 Cabot voyages, 1497, 1498
Henry VIII, 1509–1547 English Reformation began
Edward VI, 1547–1553 Strong Protestant tendencies
“Bloody” Mary, 1553–1558 Catholic reaction
Elizabeth I, 1558–1603 Break with Roman Catholic Church final;
Drake; Spanish Armada defeated
*See p. 53 for a continuation of the table.
Virginia’s Beginnings 29
English settlers, all of them men, disembarked. They
called the place Jamestown.
The early years of Jamestown proved a nightmare for
all concerned—except the buzzards. Forty would-be
colonists perished during the initial voyage in 1606–1607.
Another expedition in 1609 lost its leaders and many of
its precious supplies in a shipwreck off Bermuda. Once
ashore in Virginia, the settlers died by the dozens from
disease, malnutrition, and starvation. Ironically, the
woods rustled with game and the rivers flopped with fish,
but the greenhorn settlers, many of them self-styled “gen-
tlemen” unaccustomed to fending for themselves,
wasted valuable time grubbing for nonexistent gold
when they should have been gathering provisions.
Virginia was saved from utter collapse at the start
largely by the leadership and resourcefulness of an
intrepid young adventurer, Captain John Smith. Taking
over in 1608, he whipped the gold-hungry colonists into
line with the rule, “He who shall not work shall not eat.”
He had been kidnapped in December 1607 and sub-
jected to a mock execution by the Indian chieftain
Powhatan, whose daughter Pocahontas had “saved”
Smith by dramatically interposing her head between his
and the war clubs of his captors. The symbolism of this
ritual was apparently intended to impress Smith with
Powhatan’s power and with the Indians’ desire for
peaceful relations with the Virginians. Pocahontas
became an intermediary between the Indians and the
settlers, helping to preserve a shaky peace and to
provide needed foodstuffs.
Still, the colonists died in droves, and living skele-
tons were driven to desperate acts. They were reduced
to eating “dogges, Catts, Ratts, and Myce” and even to
digging up corpses for food. One hungry man killed,
salted, and ate his wife, for which misbehavior he was
executed. Of the four hundred settlers who managed to
30 CHAPTER 2 The Planting of English America, 1500–1733
Pocahontas (c. 1595–1617) Taken to England by
her husband, she was received as a princess. She
died when preparing to return, but her infant son
ultimately reached Virginia, where hundreds of
his descendants have lived, including the second
Mrs. Woodrow Wilson.
make it to Virginia by 1609, only sixty survived the
“starving time” winter of 1609–1610.
Diseased and despairing, the remaining colonists
dragged themselves aboard homeward-bound ships in
The authorities meted out harsh discipline
in the young Virginia colony. One
Jamestown settler who publicly criticized
the governor was sentenced to
“be disarmed [and] have his arms
broken and his tongue bored through
with an awl [and] shall pass through
a guard of 40 men and shall be butted
[with muskets] by every one of them
and at the head of the troop kicked
down and footed out of the fort.”
the spring of 1610, only to be met at the mouth of the
James River by a long-awaited relief party headed by a
new governor, Lord De La Warr. He ordered the settlers
back to Jamestown, imposed a harsh military regime on
the colony, and soon undertook aggressive military
action against the Indians.
Disease continued to reap a gruesome harvest among
the Virginians. By 1625 Virginia contained only some
twelve hundred hard-bitten survivors of the nearly eight
thousand adventurers who had tried to start life anew in
the ill-fated colony.
Cultural Clash in the Chesapeake
When the English landed in 1607, the chieftain Powhatan
dominated the native peoples living in the James River
area. He had asserted supremacy over a few dozen small
tribes, loosely affiliated in what somewhat grandly came
to be called Powhatan’s Confederacy. The English
colonists dubbed all the local Indians, somewhat inaccu-
rately, the Powhatans. Powhatan at first may have con-
sidered the English potential allies in his struggle to
extend his power still further over his Indian rivals, and
he tried to be conciliatory. But relations between the
Indians and the English remained tense, especially as the
starving colonists took to raiding Indian food supplies.
The atmosphere grew even more strained after Lord
De La Warr arrived in 1610. He carried orders from the
Virginia Company that amounted to a declaration of war
against the Indians in the Jamestown region. A veteran
of the vicious campaigns against the Irish, De La Warr
now introduced “Irish tactics” against the Indians. His
troops raided Indian villages, burned houses, confis-
cated provisions, and torched cornfields. A peace settle-
ment ended this First Anglo-Powhatan War in 1614,
sealed by the marriage of Pocahontas to the colonist
John Rolfe—the first known interracial union in Virginia.
A fragile respite followed, which endured eight
years. But the Indians, pressed by the land-hungry
whites and ravaged by European diseases, struck back in
1622. A series of Indian attacks left 347 settlers dead,
including John Rolfe. In response the Virginia Company
issued new orders calling for “a perpetual war without
peace or truce,” one that would prevent the Indians
“from being any longer a people.” Periodic punitive
raids systematically reduced the native population and
drove the survivors ever farther westward.
In the Second Anglo-Powhatan War in 1644, the
Indians made one last effort to dislodge the Virginians.

A Carolina Indian Woman and Child, by John
White The artist was a member of the Raleigh
expedition of 1585. Notice that the Indian girl car-
ries a European doll, illustrating the mingling of
cultures that had already begun.
They were again defeated. The peace treaty of 1646
repudiated any hope of assimilating the native peoples
into Virginian society or of peacefully coexisting with
them. Instead it effectively banished the Chesapeake
Indians from their ancestral lands and formally sepa-
rated Indian from white areas of settlement—the ori-
gins of the later reservation system. By 1669 an official
census revealed that only about two thousand Indians
remained in Virginia, perhaps 10 percent of the popula-
tion the original English settlers had encountered in
1607. By 1685 the English considered the Powhatan
peoples extinct.
It had been the Powhatans’ calamitous misfortune
to fall victim to three Ds: disease, disorganization, and
Virginians and Native Americans 31
disposability. Like native peoples throughout the New
World, they were extremely susceptible to European-
borne maladies. Epidemics of smallpox and measles
raced mercilessly through their villages. The Powhatans
also—despite the apparent cohesiveness of “Powhatan’s
Confederacy”—lacked the unity with which to make
effective opposition to the comparatively well-organized
and militarily disciplined whites. Finally, unlike the
Indians whom the Spaniards had encountered to the
south, who could be put to work in the mines and had
gold and silver to trade, the Powhatans served no eco-
nomic function for the Virginia colonists. They provided
no reliable labor source and, after the Virginians began
growing their own food crops, had no valuable com-
modities to offer in commerce. The natives, as far as the
Virginians were concerned, could be disposed of with-
out harm to the colonial economy. Indeed the Indian
presence frustrated the colonists’ desire for a local com-
modity the Europeans desperately wanted: land.
The Indians’ New World
The fate of the Powhatans foreshadowed the destinies
of indigenous peoples throughout the continent as
the process of European settlement went forward.
Native Americans, of course, had a history well before
Columbus’s arrival. They were no strangers to change,
adaptation, and even catastrophe, as the rise and
decline of civilizations such as the Mississippians
and the Anasazis demonstrated. But the shock of
large-scale European colonization disrupted Native
American life on a vast scale, inducing unprecedented
demographic and cultural transformations.
Some changes were fairly benign. Horses—stolen,
strayed, or purchased from Spanish invaders—catalyzed
a substantial Indian migration onto the Great Plains in
the eighteenth century. Peoples such as the Lakotas
(Sioux), who had previously been sedentary forest
dwellers, now moved onto the wide-open plains. There
they thrived impressively, adopting an entirely new way
of life as mounted nomadic hunters. But the effects of
contact with Europeans proved less salutary for most
other native peoples.
Disease was by far the biggest disrupter, as Old
World pathogens licked lethally through biologically
defenseless Indian populations. Disease took more
than human life; it extinguished entire cultures and
occasionally helped shape new ones. Epidemics often
robbed native peoples of the elders who preserved the
32 CHAPTER 2 The Planting of English America, 1500–1733
Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) in a 1753
letter to Peter Collinson commented on the
attractiveness of Indian life to Europeans:
“When an Indian child has been
brought up among us, taught our lan-
guage and habituated to our customs,
yet if he goes to see his relations and
make one Indian ramble with them,
there is no persuading him ever to
return. [But] when white persons of
either sex have been taken prisoners
by the Indians, and lived awhile
among them, though ransomed by their
friends, and treated with all imagina-
ble tenderness to prevail with them to
stay among the English, yet in a short
time they become disgusted with our
manner of life, and the care and pains
that are necessary to support it, and
take the first good opportunity of
escaping again into the woods, from
whence there is no reclaiming them.”
oral traditions that held clans together. Devastated
Indian bands then faced the daunting task of literally
reinventing themselves without benefit of accumulated
wisdom or kin networks. The decimation and forced
migration of native peoples sometimes scrambled them
together in wholly new ways. The Catawba nation of the
southern Piedmont region, for example, was formed
from splintered remnants of several different groups
uprooted by the shock of the Europeans’ arrival.
Trade also transformed Indian life, as traditional
barter-and-exchange networks gave way to the tempta-
tions of European commerce. Firearms, for example,
conferred enormous advantages on those who could
purchase them from Europeans. The desire for firearms
thus intensified competition among the tribes for access
to prime hunting grounds that could supply the skins
and pelts that the European arms traders wanted. The
result was an escalating cycle of Indian-on-Indian
violence, fueled by the lure and demands of European
trade goods.
Native Americans were swept up in the expanding
Atlantic economy, but they usually struggled in vain to
control their own place in it. One desperate band of
Virginia Indians, resentful at the prices offered by British
traders for their deerskins, loaded a fleet of canoes with
hides and tried to paddle to England to sell their goods
directly. Not far from the Virginia shore, a storm
swamped their frail craft. Their cargo lost, the few sur-
vivors were picked up by an English ship and sold into
slavery in the West Indies.
Indians along the Atlantic seaboard felt the most
ferocious effects of European contact. Farther inland,
native peoples had the advantages of time, space, and
numbers as they sought to adapt to the European incur-
sion. The Algonquians in the Great Lakes area, for
instance, became a substantial regional power. They
bolstered their population by absorbing various sur-
rounding bands and dealt from a position of strength
with the few Europeans who managed to penetrate the
interior. As a result, a British or French trader wanting to
do business with the inland tribes had little choice but
to conform to Indian ways, often taking an Indian wife.
Thus was created a middle ground, a zone where both
Europeans and Native Americans were compelled to
accommodate to one another—at least until the Euro-
peans began to arrive in large numbers.
Virginia: Child
of Tobacco
John Rolfe, the husband of Pocahontas, became father
of the tobacco industry and an economic savior of the
Virginia colony. By 1612 he had perfected methods of
raising and curing the pungent weed, eliminating much
of the bitter tang. Soon the European demand for
tobacco was nearly insatiable. A tobacco rush swept
over Virginia, as crops were planted in the streets of
Jamestown and even between the numerous graves. So
exclusively did the colonists concentrate on planting the
yellow leaf that at first they had to import some of their
foodstuffs. Colonists who had once hungered for food
now hungered for land, ever more land on which to
plant ever more tobacco. Relentlessly, they pressed the
frontier of settlement up the river valleys to the west,
abrasively edging against the Indians.
Virginia’s prosperity was finally built on tobacco
smoke. This “bewitching weed” played a vital role in
putting the colony on firm economic foundations. But
tobacco—King Nicotine—was something of a tyrant. It
was ruinous to the soil when greedily planted in succes-
 Slavery and Democracy in Early Virginia 33

The wife of a Virginia governor wrote to her

sister in England in 1623 of her voyage:
“For our Shippe was so pestered with
people and goods that we were so full
of infection that after a while we saw
little but throwing folkes over board: It
pleased god to send me my helth till I
came to shoare and 3 dayes after I fell
sick but I thank god I am well recov-
ered. Few else are left alive that came
in that Shippe. “
Maryland: Catholic Haven
Maryland—the second plantation colony but the fourth
English colony to be planted—was founded in 1634 by
Lord Baltimore, of a prominent English Catholic family.
He embarked upon the venture partly to reap financial
profits and partly to create a refuge for his fellow
Catholics. Protestant England was still persecuting
Roman Catholics; among numerous discriminations, a
couple seeking wedlock could not be legally married by
a Catholic priest.

Advertisement of a Voyage to America, 1609

sive years, and it enchained the fortunes of Virginia to

the fluctuating price of a single crop. Fatefully, tobacco
also promoted the broad-acred plantation system and
with it a brisk demand for fresh labor.
In 1619, the year before the Plymouth Pilgrims
landed in New England, what was described as a Dutch
warship appeared off Jamestown and sold some twenty
Africans. The scanty record does not reveal whether
they were purchased as lifelong slaves or as servants
committed to limited years of servitude. However it
transpired, this simple commercial transaction planted
the seeds of the North American slave system. Yet blacks
were too costly for most of the hard-pinched white
colonists to acquire, and for decades few were brought
to Virginia. In 1650 Virginia counted but three hundred
blacks, although by the end of the century blacks, most
of them enslaved, made up approximately 14 percent of
the colony’s population.
Representative self-government was also born in
primitive Virginia, in the same cradle with slavery and in
the same year—1619. The London Company authorized
the settlers to summon an assembly, known as the House
of Burgesses. A momentous precedent was thus feebly
established, for this assemblage was the first of many
miniature parliaments to flourish in the soil of America.
As time passed, James I grew increasingly hostile to
Virginia. He detested tobacco, and he distrusted the rep-
resentative House of Burgesses, which he branded a
“seminary of sedition.” In 1624 he revoked the charter of
the bankrupt and beleaguered Virginia Company, thus
making Virginia a royal colony directly under his control.
34 CHAPTER 2 The Planting of English America, 1500–1733

Lord Baltimore, a canny soul, permitted unusual

Su
sq
freedom of worship at the outset. He hoped that he

ue
R.

ha
re

nn
wa would thus purchase toleration for his own fellow wor-

a
la
De

R.
MARYLAND shipers. But the heavy tide of Protestants threatened to
submerge the Catholics and place severe restrictions on
them, as in England. Faced with disaster, the Catholics
Po

Delaware
om
t

ac Bay
R. of Maryland threw their support behind the famed
Act of Toleration, which was passed in 1649 by the local
C he sa

representative assembly.
peak

St. Marys Maryland’s new religious statute guaranteed tolera-

e Ba

(1634)
tion to all Christians. But, less liberally, it decreed the
y

VIRGINIA Yo
rk death penalty for those, like Jews and atheists, who
Ja R.
m es R denied the divinity of Jesus. The law thus sanctioned less
.

ATLANTIC toleration than had previously existed in the settlement,

Jamestown
(1607) OCEAN but it did extend a temporary cloak of protection to the
uneasy Catholic minority. One result was that when the
colonial era ended, Maryland probably sheltered more
Roman Catholics than any other English-speaking
Limit of original grant to Lord Baltimore Roanoke
Island
colony in the New World.
Present boundary of Maryland (1580s)

Early Maryland and Virginia

Absentee proprietor Lord Baltimore hoped that
the two hundred settlers who founded Maryland at St.
Marys, on Chesapeake Bay, would be the vanguard of
a vast new feudal domain. Huge estates were to be
awarded to his largely Catholic relatives, and gracious
manor houses, modeled on those of England’s aris-
tocracy, were intended to arise amidst the fertile
forests. As in Virginia, colonists proved willing to
come only if offered the opportunity to acquire land
of their own. Soon they were dispersed around
the Chesapeake region on modest farms, and the
haughty land barons, mostly Catholic, were sur-
rounded by resentful backcountry planters, mostly
Protestant. Resentment flared into open rebellion
near the end of the century, and the Baltimore family
for a time lost its proprietary rights.
Despite these tensions Maryland prospered. Like
Virginia, it blossomed forth in acres of tobacco. Also like
Virginia, it depended for labor in its early years mainly
on white indentured servants—penniless persons who
bound themselves to work for a number of years to pay
their passage. In both colonies it was only in the later
years of the seventeenth century that black slaves
began to be imported in large numbers.
The West Indies: Way Station
to Mainland America
While the English were planting the first frail colonial
shoots in the Chesapeake, they also were busily coloniz-
ing the West Indies. Spain, weakened by military over-
extension and distracted by its rebellious Dutch
provinces, relaxed its grip on much of the Caribbean
in the early 1600s. By the mid-seventeenth century, Eng-
land had secured its claim to several West Indian islands,
including the large prize of Jamaica in 1655.
Sugar formed the foundation of the West Indian
economy. What tobacco was to the Chesapeake, sugar
cane was to the Caribbean—with one crucial difference.
Tobacco was a poor man’s crop. It could be planted
easily, it produced commercially marketable leaves
within a year, and it required only simple processing.
Sugar cane, in contrast, was a rich man’s crop. It had to
be planted extensively to yield commercially viable
quantities of sugar. Extensive planting, in turn, required
extensive and arduous land clearing. And the cane stalks
yielded their sugar only after an elaborate process of
refining in a sugar mill. The need for land and for
the labor to clear it and to run the mills made sugar cul-
tivation a capital-intensive business. Only wealthy
growers with abundant capital to invest could succeed
in sugar.
 English Colonization in the Caribbean 35

(above) Sugar Mill in Brazil, by Frans Post, c. 1640 (left) Saccharum

Officinarum (sugar cane)

To control this large and potentially restive popula-

tion of slaves, English authorities devised formal “codes”
that defined the slaves’ legal status and masters’ prerog-
atives. The notorious Barbados slave code of 1661
denied even the most fundamental rights to slaves
and gave masters virtually complete control over their

African slaves destined for the West Indian

sugar plantations were bound and branded
on West African beaches and ferried out in
canoes to the waiting slave ships. An English
The sugar lords extended their dominion over the sailor described the scene:
West Indies in the seventeenth century. To work their
“The Negroes are so wilful and loth to
sprawling plantations, they imported enormous num-
leave their own country, that have
bers of African slaves—more than a quarter of a million
often leap’d out of the canoes, boat and
in the five decades after 1640. By about 1700, black
ship, into the sea, and kept under
slaves outnumbered white settlers in the English West
water till they were drowned, to avoid
Indies by nearly four to one, and the region’s population
being taken up and saved by our boats,
has remained predominantly black ever since. West
which pursued them; they having a
Indians thus take their place among the numerous chil-
more dreadful apprehension of
dren of the African diaspora—the vast scattering of
Barbadoes than we can have of hell.”
African peoples throughout the New World in the three
and a half centuries following Columbus’s discovery.
36 CHAPTER 2 The Planting of English America, 1500–1733
The Barbados slave code (1661) declared,
“If any Negro or slave whatsoever shall
offer any violence to any Christian by
striking or the like, such Negro or slave
shall for his or her first offence be
severely whipped by the Constable.
For his second offence of that nature he
shall be severely whipped, his nose
slit, and be burned in some part of his
face with a hot iron. And being brutish
slaves, [they] deserve not, for the base-
ness of their condition, to be tried by
the legal trial of twelve men of their
peers, as the subjects of England are.
And it is further enacted and ordained
that if any Negro or other slave under
punishment by his master unfortunate-
ly shall suffer in life or member, which
seldom happens, no person whatsoever
shall be liable to any fine therefore.”
laborers, including the right to inflict vicious punish-
ments for even slight infractions.
The profitable sugar-plantation system soon
crowded out almost all other forms of Caribbean agri-
culture. The West Indies increasingly depended on the
North American mainland for foodstuffs and other basic
supplies. And smaller English farmers, squeezed out by
the greedy sugar barons, began to migrate to the newly
founded southern mainland colonies. A group
of displaced English settlers from Barbados arrived in
Carolina in 1670. They brought with them a few African
slaves, as well as the model of the Barbados slave code,
which eventually inspired statutes governing slavery
throughout the mainland colonies. Carolina officially
adopted a version of the Barbados slave code in 1696.
Just as the West Indies had been a testing ground for the
encomienda system that the Spanish had brought to
Mexico and South America, so the Caribbean islands
now served as a staging area for the slave system that
would take root elsewhere in English North America.
Colonizing the Carolinas
Civil war convulsed England in the 1640s. King Charles I
had dismissed Parliament in 1629, and when he eventu-
ally recalled it in 1640, the members were mutinous.
Finding their great champion in the Puritan-soldier
Oliver Cromwell, they ultimately beheaded Charles in
1649, and Cromwell ruled England for nearly a decade.
Finally, Charles II, son of the decapitated king, was
restored to the throne in 1660.
Colonization had been interrupted during this
period of bloody unrest. Now, in the so-called Restora-
tion period, empire building resumed with even greater
intensity—and royal involvement. Carolina, named for
Charles II, was formally created in 1670, after the king
granted to eight of his court favorites, the Lords Propri-
etors, an expanse of wilderness ribboning across the
continent to the Pacific. These aristocratic founders
hoped to grow foodstuffs to provision the sugar planta-
tions in Barbados and to export non-English products
like wine, silk, and olive oil.
Carolina prospered by developing close economic
ties with the flourishing sugar islands of the English
West Indies. In a broad sense, the mainland colony was
but the most northerly of those outposts. Many origi-
nal Carolina settlers, in fact, had emigrated from
Barbados, bringing that island’s slave system with
them. They also established a vigorous slave trade in
Early Carolina Coins These copper halfpennies bore
the image of an elephant, an unofficial symbol of the
colony, and a prayer for the Lords Proprietors.
 The “Restoration Colonies” 37

Carolina itself. Enlisting the aid of the coastal Savan-
nah Indians, they forayed into the interior in search of
captives. The Lords Proprietors in London protested
against Indian slave trading in their colony, but to no
avail. Manacled Indians soon were among the young
colony’s major exports. As many as ten thousand Indi-
ans were dispatched to lifelong labor in the West
Indian canefields and sugar mills. Others were sent to
New England. One Rhode Island town in 1730 counted
more than two hundred Indian slaves from Carolina in
its midst.
In 1707 the Savannah Indians decided to end their
alliance with the Carolinians and to migrate to the back-
country of Maryland and Pennsylvania, where a new
colony founded by Quakers under William Penn promised
better relations between whites and Indians. But the
Carolinians determined to “thin” the Savannahs before
they could depart. A series of bloody raids all but annihi-
lated the Indian tribes of coastal Carolina by 1710.
After much experimentation, rice emerged as the
principal export crop in Carolina. Rice was then an
exotic food in England; no rice seeds were sent out from

The Thirteen Original Colonies

Name Founded by Year Charter Made Royal 1775 Status

1. Virginia

2. New Hampshire
London Co.

John Mason
1607

1623
{ 1606
1609
1612
1679
1624

1679
Royal (under the crown)

Royal (absorbed by Mass.,

and others 1641–1679)
3. Massachusetts Puritans c. 1628 1629 1691 Royal
Plymouth Separatists 1620 None (Merged with Mass., 1691)
Maine F. Gorges 1623 1639 (Bought by Mass., 1677)
4. Maryland Lord Baltimore 1634 1632 ——— Proprietary (controlled by
proprietor)
5. Connecticut Mass. emigrants 1635 1662 ——— Self-governing (under
local control)
New Haven Mass. emigrants 1638 None (Merged with Conn.,
1662)
6. Rhode Island R. Williams 1636
{1644
1663
——— Self-governing

7. Delaware Swedes 1638 None ——— Proprietary (merged with

Pa., 1682; same governor,
but separate assembly,
granted 1703)
8. N. Carolina Virginians 1653 1663 1729 Royal (separated informally
from S.C., 1691)
9. New York Dutch c. 1613
Duke of York 1664 1664 1685 Royal
10. New Jersey Berkeley and 1664 None 1702 Royal
Carteret
11. Carolina Eight nobles 1670 1663 1729 Royal (separated formally
from N.C., 1712)
12. Pennsylvania William Penn 1681 1681 ——— Proprietary
13. Georgia Oglethorpe and 1733 1732 1752 Royal
others
38 CHAPTER 2 The Planting of English America, 1500–1733

London in the first supply ships to Carolina. But rice was

grown in Africa, and the Carolinians were soon paying
premium prices for West African slaves experienced in The Emergence of North Carolina
rice cultivation. The Africans’ agricultural skill and their
relative immunity to malaria (thanks to a genetic trait The wild northern expanse of the huge Carolina grant
that also, unfortunately, made them and their descen- bordered on Virginia. From the older colony there
dants susceptible to sickle-cell anemia) made them ideal drifted down a ragtag group of poverty-stricken outcasts
laborers on the hot and swampy rice plantations. By 1710 and religious dissenters. Many of them had been
they constituted a majority of Carolinians. repelled by the rarefied atmosphere of Virginia, domi-
Moss-festooned Charles Town—also named for the nated as it was by big-plantation gentry belonging to
king—rapidly became the busiest seaport in the South. the Church of England. North Carolinians, as a result,
Many high-spirited sons of English landed families, have been called “the quintessence of Virginia’s discon-
deprived of an inheritance, came to the Charleston area tent.” The newcomers, who frequently were “squatters”
and gave it a rich aristocratic flavor. The village became without legal right to the soil, raised their tobacco and
a colorfully diverse community, to which French other crops on small farms, with little need for slaves.
Protestant refugees and others were attracted by reli- Distinctive traits developed rapidly in North
gious toleration. Carolina. The poor but sturdy inhabitants, regarded as
Nearby, in Florida, the Catholic Spaniards abhorred riffraff by their snobbish neighbors, earned a reputa-
the intrusion of these Protestant heretics. Carolina’s tion for being irreligious and hospitable to pirates.
frontier was often aflame. Spanish-incited Indians bran- Isolated from neighbors by raw wilderness and stormy
dished their tomahawks, and armor-clad warriors of Cape Hatteras, “graveyard of the Atlantic,” the North
Spain frequently unsheathed their swords during the Carolinians developed a strong spirit of resistance to
successive Anglo-Spanish wars. But by 1700 Carolina authority. Their location between aristocratic Virginia
was too strong to be wiped out. and aristocratic South Carolina caused the area to be
dubbed “a vale of humility between two mountains of
conceit.” Following much friction with governors,
North Carolina was officially separated from South
Carolina in 1712, and subsequently each segment
became a royal colony.
Early Carolina and Georgia Settlements North Carolina shares with tiny Rhode Island
several distinctions. These two outposts were the most
VIRGINIA
democratic, the most independent-minded, and the
James R. least aristocratic of the original thirteen English colonies.
Jamestown Although northern Carolina, unlike the colony’s
1607 Roanoke
Island southern reaches, did not at first import large numbers
1585
NORTH of African slaves, both regions shared in the ongoing
Cape Hatteras
CAROLINA tragedy of bloody relations between Indians and Euro-
1712 Newbern
1710 peans. Tuscarora Indians fell upon the fledgling settle-
SOUTH ment at Newbern in 1711. The North Carolinians, aided
CAROLINA by their heavily armed brothers from the south, retali-
1670
GEORGIA Charleston
ated by crushing the Tuscaroras in battle, selling hun-
1733 1670 dreds of them into slavery and leaving the survivors to
Savannah wander northward to seek the protection of the Iro-
1733
quois. The Tuscaroras eventually became the Sixth
Nation of the Iroquois Confederacy. In another ferocious
SPANISH Added to Georgia 1763
FLORIDA
encounter four years later, the South Carolinians
defeated and dispersed the Yamasee Indians.

With the conquest of the Yamasees, virtually all the
coastal Indian tribes in the southern colonies had been
utterly devastated by about 1720. Yet in the interior, in
the hills and valleys of the Appalachian Mountains, the
powerful Cherokees, Creeks, and Iroquois (see “Makers
of America: The Iroquois,” pp. 40–41) remained. Stronger
and more numerous than their coastal cousins, they
managed for half a century more to contain British set-
tlement to the coastal plain east of the mountains.
Late-Coming Georgia:
The Buffer Colony
Pine-forested Georgia, with the harbor of Savannah
nourishing its chief settlement, was formally founded in
1733. It proved to be the last of the thirteen colonies to
be planted—126 years after the first, Virginia, and 52
years after the twelfth, Pennsylvania. Chronologically
Georgia belongs elsewhere, but geographically it may be
grouped with its southern neighbors.
The English crown intended Georgia to serve chiefly
as a buffer. It would protect the more valuable Carolinas
against vengeful Spaniards from Florida and against the
hostile French from Louisiana. Georgia indeed suffered
much buffeting, especially when wars broke out between
Spain and England in the European arena. As a vital link in
imperial defense, the exposed colony received monetary
subsidies from the British government at the outset—the
only one of the “original thirteen” to enjoy this benefit in
its founding stage.
Named in honor of King George II of England, Georgia
was launched by a high-minded group of philanthropists.
In addition to protecting their neighboring northern
colonies and producing silk and wine, they were deter-
mined to carve out a haven for wretched souls imprisoned
for debt. They were also determined, at least at first, to
keep slavery out of Georgia. The ablest of the founders was
the dynamic soldier-statesman James Oglethorpe, who
became keenly interested in prison reform after one of his
friends died in a debtors’ jail. As an able military leader,
Oglethorpe repelled Spanish attacks. As an imperialist and
a philanthropist, he saved “the Charity Colony” by his
energetic leadership and by heavily mortgaging his own
personal fortune.
The Colonial South 39
The hamlet of Savannah, like Charleston, was a
melting-pot community. German Lutherans and kilted
Scots Highlanders, among others, added color to the
pattern. All Christian worshipers except Catholics
enjoyed religious toleration. Many missionaries armed
with Bibles and hope arrived in Savannah to work
among debtors and Indians. Prominent among them
was young John Wesley, who later returned to England
and founded the Methodist Church.
Georgia grew with painful slowness and at the end
of the colonial era was perhaps the least populous of the
colonies. The development of a plantation economy
was thwarted by an unhealthy climate, by early restric-
tions on black slavery, and by demoralizing Spanish
attacks.
The Plantation Colonies
Certain distinctive features were shared by England’s
southern mainland colonies: Maryland, Virginia, North
Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Broad-acred,
these outposts of empire were all in some degree
devoted to exporting commercial agricultural products.
Profitable staple crops were the rule, notably tobacco
and rice, though to a lesser extent in small-farm North
Carolina. Slavery was found in all the plantation
colonies, though only after 1750 in reform-minded
Georgia. Immense acreage in the hands of a favored few
fostered a strong aristocratic atmosphere, except in
North Carolina and to some extent in debtor-tinged
Georgia. The wide scattering of plantations and farms,
often along stately rivers, retarded the growth of cities
and made the establishment of churches and schools
both difficult and expensive. In 1671 the governor of
Virginia thanked God that no free schools or printing
presses existed in his colony.
All the plantation colonies permitted some religious
toleration. The tax-supported Church of England
became the dominant faith, though weakest of all in
nonconformist North Carolina.
These colonies were in some degree expansionary.
“Soil butchery” by excessive tobacco growing drove
settlers westward, and the long, lazy rivers invited pene-
tration of the continent—and continuing confrontation
with Native Americans.
 The Iroquois Montagnais Quebec

W ell before the crowned heads of Europe turned

their eyes and their dreams of empire toward
North America, a great military power had emerged
Algonquin

NE W F R A NC E
aki
Montreal en
in the Mohawk Valley of what is now New York State.

Ab
R.
ce
The Iroquois Confederacy, dubbed by whites the ren
aw Lake
.t L Champlain
“League of the Iroquois,” bound together five Indian S

nations—the Mohawks, the Oneidas, the Onondagas, cy NEW

ND
Huron era
fed ENGLAND

ERLA
the Cayugas, and the Senecas. According to Iroquois n
o Mohawk
n tario

Connecticut R.
Lake O

sC

Mahican
legend, it was founded in the late 1500s by two leaders, uo
i
M oh
Iroq

NETH
awk
Deganawidah and Hiawatha. This proud and potent

Ono
R.

One
Seneca

Cayuga
league vied initially with neighboring Indians for terri- ie

ndag
Er

ida

.
aR
Fort Orange
torial supremacy, then with the French, English, and L.

nn
a
R.

Hudson R.
ha

NEW
Dutch for control of the fur trade. Ultimately, infected y Susq ue
en
gh

by the white man’s diseases, intoxicated by his whiskey,

lle
A

0 50 100 Miles
and intimidated by his muskets, the Iroquois struggled
for their very survival as a people. 0 50 100 Kilometers New Amsterdam
The building block of Iroquois society was the
longhouse (see photo p. 41). This wooden structure Iroquois Lands and European Trade
deserved its descriptive name. Only twenty-five feet in Centers, c. 1590–1650
breadth, the longhouse stretched from eight to two
hundred feet in length. Each building contained three
to five fireplaces around which gathered two nuclear
families, consisting of parents and children. All fami-
lies residing in the longhouse were related, their
connections of blood running exclusively through the An Iroquois Canoe In frail but artfully constructed
craft like this, the Iroquois traversed the abundant
maternal line. A single longhouse might shelter a
waters of their confederacy and traded with their
neighbors, Indians as well as whites.

40
woman’s family and those of her mother, sisters, and
daughters—with the oldest woman being the honored
matriarch. When a man married, he left his childhood
hearth in the home of his mother to join the longhouse
of his wife. Men dominated in Iroquois society, but
they owed their positions of prominence to their moth-
ers’ families.
As if sharing one great longhouse, the five nations
joined in the Iroquois Confederacy but kept their own
separate fires. Although they celebrated together and
shared a common policy toward outsiders, they
remained essentially independent of one another. On
the eastern flank of the league, the Mohawks, known
as the Keepers of the Eastern Fire, specialized as mid-
dlemen with European traders, whereas the outlying
Senecas, the Keepers of the Western Fire, became fur
suppliers.
After banding together to end generations of violent
warfare among themselves, the Five Nations vanquished
their rivals, the neighboring Hurons, Eries, and Petuns.
Some other tribes, such as the Tuscaroras from the
Carolina region, sought peaceful absorption into the
Iroquois Confederacy. The Iroquois further expanded
their numbers by means of periodic “mourning wars,”
whose objective was the large-scale adoption of captives
and refugees. But the arrival of gun-toting Europeans
threatened Iroquois supremacy and enmeshed the con-
41
federacy in a tangled web of diplomatic intrigues.
Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
they allied alternately with the English against the
French and vice versa, for a time successfully working
this perpetual rivalry to their own advantage. But when
the American Revolution broke out, the confederacy
could reach no consensus on which side to support.
Each tribe was left to decide independently; most,
though not all, sided with the British. The ultimate
British defeat left the confederacy in tatters. Many
Iroquois, especially the Mohawks, moved to new lands
in British Canada; others were relegated to reservations
in western New York.
Reservation life proved unbearable for a proud
people accustomed to domination over a vast territory.
Morale sank; brawling, feuding, and alcoholism became
rampant. Out of this morass arose a prophet, an Iroquois
called Handsome Lake. In 1799 angelic figures clothed
in traditional Iroquois garb appeared to Handsome Lake
in a vision and warned him that the moral decline of his
people must end if they were to endure. He awoke from
his vision to warn his tribespeople to mend their ways.
His socially oriented gospel inspired many Iroquois to
forsake alcohol, to affirm family values, and to revive old
Iroquois customs. Handsome Lake died in 1815, but his
teachings, in the form of the Longhouse religion, survive
to this day.
The Longhouse (reconstruction)
The photo shows a modern-day
reconstruction of a Delaware
Indian longhouse (almost identical
in design and building materials
to the Iroquois longhouses), at
Historic Waterloo Village on
Winakung Island in New Jersey.
(The Iroquois conquered the
Delawares in the late 1600s.)
Bent saplings and sheets of elm
bark made for sturdy, weather-
tight shelters. Longhouses were
typically furnished with deerskin-
covered bunks and shelves for
storing baskets, pots, fur pelts,
and corn.
42 CHAPTER 2 The Planting of English America, 1500–1733

Chronology
1558 Elizabeth I becomes queen of England 1640s Large-scale slave-labor system
established in English West Indies
c. 1565-
1590 English crush Irish uprising 1644 Second Anglo-Powhatan War

1577 Drake circumnavigates the globe 1649 Act of Toleration in Maryland

Charles I beheaded; Cromwell rules
1585 Raleigh founds “lost colony” at Roanoke England

1588 England defeats Spanish Armada 1660 Charles II restored to English throne
1603 James I becomes king of England
1661 Barbados slave code adopted
1604 Spain and England sign peace treaty
1670 Carolina colony created
1607 Virginia colony founded at Jamestown
1711-
1612 Rolfe perfects tobacco culture in Virginia 1713 Tuscarora War in North Carolina

1614 First Anglo-Powhatan War ends 1712 North Carolina formally separates from
South Carolina
1619 First Africans arrive in Jamestown
Virginia House of Burgesses established 1715-
1716 Yamasee War in South Carolina
1624 Virginia becomes royal colony
1733 Georgia colony founded
1634 Maryland colony founded

For further reading, see the Appendix. For web resources, go to http://college.hmco.com.